Magic & Delight

Archive for the ‘Magic & Delight’ Category

February 9th, 2011

Jelly at Boost: Friday co-working for free

Posted by Nathan on February 9th, 2011

Jelly at Boost is casual co-working in Wellington. Every Friday we open our space for 10 people to work, drink our coffee and steal our wifi for free. We are a small part of a large international movement that started in a Brooklyn apartment with some contractors sharing their lounge. There are now Jellies in over a hundred cities.

Why are we Jellying?
We want to give back to the design and development community. Wellington is a great place to be creative and we want to do our part in making it even better. We want to provide a low key, easy going space where people can get work done.

We’re not on an idealogical mission to join all humanity in loving harmony; though if it did happen, we’d be surprised, very surprised, but we wouldn’t freak out :-).

We’ve had some great feedback from the first Jelly last Friday, and are looking forward to this week’s Jelly. Space is limited so if you are keen DM us on Twitter (or drop us an email) with your name and what you will be working on (broadly speaking) and we will save you a place.

Hope to see you soon.

Tags: co-working, jelly at boost, wellington

Posted in: Design, Development, Magic & Delight

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December 6th, 2008

Liberating our digital content

Posted by sarah on December 6th, 2008

I’m the first to let my mind wander when someone talks metadata to me, but Digital New Zealand has converted me to its power. I posted recently on this initiative from the National Library. Well, DigitalNZ was officially launched this week by a talent National Library team and their content partners and collaborators, who should be rightly chuffed with their achievements.

To top the release of the Coming Home search widget and the remixing tool Memory Maker, DigitalNZ has released an open API that lets developers build services over the metadata that DigitalNZ has harvested from its content partners in the culture and heritage sector. To understand how this works, click on the fabulous diagram above, which explains it visually much better than I ever could in words.

An example of the kind of tool that’s possible (one that the DigitalNZ team ‘prepared earlier’) is the customisable search builder, which lets users design their own mini search engine to search for New Zealand content on a subject of their interest – volcanoes, disasters, ANZAC day, and so on.

Wow! You can see the educational uses immediately. Pop a search on your wiki or website relating to your class’s inquiry or project – learners will be guaranteed quality New Zealand content on that topic.

Tags: culture and heritage, digital content, Digital media, DigitalNZ, mashups, national identity, National Library, NZLive.com, Software for Learning, widgets

Posted in: e-Learning, Magic & Delight

3 Comments

December 2nd, 2008

The iPhone is not a phone …

Posted by sarah on December 2nd, 2008

… it’s a computer – equivalent in computing power to a year 2000 PowerBook or an XBox or a PlayStation2. It’s a fine example of ubiquitous computing and convergence (a global positioning system plus wireless access to the web as well as a phone).

I’ve been out walking with Nathan and Baxter the dog. We took Nathan’s iPhone and activated the RunnKeeper iPhone application, which Nathan had previously downloaded from the iTunes App Store. On our walk, RunKeeper takes the data from the iPhone’s GPS, which marks the route and time, and sends it to the RunKeeper web application.

When we get back home, we check out www.runkeeper.com, which has received our data and displays the start and end time and distance of our walk, accesses maps to record elevation and present the route, and calculates the elapsed time, average pace and average speed. It also displays a graph plotting elevation and speed against distance. We can map multiple walks and runs over time to chart our progress and reach our fitness goals. Do we need all this data? Well, we’re finding that the increased distances that we are walking and running is motivating.

Tags: Baxter, health, iPhone, mobile, RunKeeper

Posted in: e-Learning, Magic & Delight

2 Comments

October 31st, 2008

September 27th, 2008

Magic and delight

Posted by sarah on September 27th, 2008

Some technology simply surprises and delights. I’ve posted about the web applications developed by 37signals before – their products give you what you need and nothing more. You never feel like you’re fighting the interface to make it work for you.

Quicksilver is another one. At first glance, Quicksilver simply lets you find applications and data on your computer or in the cloud. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognise which items you are searching for based on previous experience.

More than that, having found what you want, Quicksilver lets you choose what to do with it – email it, copy it, move it, launch it. You can send instant messages, dial a phone number, look up words in a dictionary and queue up songs in iTunes party shuffle without having to open an application and wrangle with its interface. You can resolve a simple task and get back to what you were doing without interruption.

Tags: Design, Magic & Delight, Quicksilver, user experience, web 3.0

Posted in: e-Learning, Magic & Delight

No Comments

August 29th, 2008

Boost Blog

Archive for the ‘Magic & Delight’ Category

Jelly at Boost: Friday co-working for free

Liberating our digital content

The iPhone is not a phone …

Magic and delight

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Archive for the ‘Magic & Delight’ Category

Jelly at Boost: Friday co-working for free

Liberating our digital content

The iPhone is not a phone …

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Magic and delight

Common Craft – social software in plain english

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